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General discussion

Question: Is Android and/or IOS true Multi-Core OSs?

Feb 18, 2011 1:45AM PST

My question is Android or IOS a true Multi-Core operating system?
I know that even today most programs written for Windows and OSX are not multi-core optimized. Are the new duel core processors by NVIDIA ahead of their time?
I've read that there are going to be quad core processors soon.
If Apple or an Android hardware maker added a multi-core processors would it give real value or is it more a marketing play?

Discussion is locked

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How deep do we need to go?
Feb 18, 2011 1:50AM PST

If we use the simple approach tasks can run on other cores and therefore we are taking advantage of the cores.

If you are some computer scientist then you may write that the scheduling of the task isn't optimal.

How deep do we need to go here?
Bob

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They're not that different to desktop OSes....
Feb 18, 2011 3:45PM PST

iOS is basically the same as OS X with a UI designed for touch. It's the same unix Mach kernel cocoa user space based system. The same tools for multithreaded OS X apps exist on it
And Android is just Linux with a java application environment. Should be even easier as a lot of it will be up to the JavaVM.

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Thank you for the information.
Feb 20, 2011 10:14AM PST

Thank you for your answers.
From my desktop experience, I would guess that multi-core would make only small improvements in speed in most tasks.
And only a few rendering Apps or complex mulit-tasking would benefit from the extra core.

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Not my experience.
Feb 21, 2011 4:40AM PST

I found the move from one to two cores to pay off handsomely as the app could run at nearly top speed as the OS duties could run on their own core. Your post makes me think you are still on single core machines.
Bob